Thursday, May 01, 2014

Robinson Crusoe: or,...

...I didn't know dying could be so much fun.

So the missus and I love Pandemic, one of our early ventures after getting back into board games. We didn't exactly win often but we loved how tense the game felt and how we knew that Epidemic card was coming and all our plans were going to go up in smoke. I think we played close to twenty games and won two or three of those before adding in the first expansion. We have yet to win a game with the expansion but it doesn't see the table as much these days.

Enter Robinson Crusoe.

Every turn you are faced with game altering decisions to play it safe or to try and stretch your resources and rely on luck to help you finish the tasks at hand. You just can't do everything you need to do in the game and it becomes a high level risk management to try and achieve whatever goal the scenario has set for you before time runs out. This game is out to get you but I never feel that it is personal, weird I know, but I feel that it is very clever in the way it doesn't feel like you are being attacked but that bad things are just happening. It is a hard feeling to get across but one that, for me at least, goes a long way towards the theme of the game.

The game has 6 scenarios and a free extra make by the game's creator that can be printed up if you run through the rest or want something special. The first expansion in also coming out in english this summer. I personally love the King Kong scenario. Now in each scenario the goal is different and the items that you can make often change so you never quite get the same feel out of each play through of a single scenario. If any one of your party dies you lose, so knowing when to hunt or how to judge the weather are all key things to keep in mind, then you usually have to achieve a goal in addition to surviving.

In short, it gives me the tension of pandemic but at a more personal level and adds a ton of ways to scale the game's difficulty. What more could I want? Except for dinosaurs, but than again I hear some fans are working on that.